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No One Wants To Hear It, But Geron Has A Stake In Spinal Cord Injury Again
May. 9.17 | About: Geron Corporation (GERN) https://seekingalpha.com/author/zach...n-phd/articleshttps://seekingalpha.com/author/zach...n-phd/articles
Zach Hartman, PhD
Biotech, healthcare, Deep Value, contrarian
(2,300 followers)
Summary
Geron's train is driven almost entirely by imetelstat, and most long-term shareholders seem to want to forget their past regenerative medicine follies.
But development has continued by BioTime after it sold the assets, and Geron stands to benefit from the approval.
Promising data from spinal cord injury should be a catalyst to consider that alternative sources of revenue may be possible in the future.
There was a time when the fate of Geron Corporation (NASDAQ:GERN) rested entirely on its nascent regenerative medicine platform, which was supported by the first ever approval for a stem cell based clinical trial in the US in January 2009.
read.....https://seekingalpha.com/article/407...al-cord-injury

Geron's stake hasn't changed. They'll get royalties of Asterias' stem cells work as they would've a month ago or a year ago. The only reason it's in the news is some recent pr from the Asterias trials which is tempered by reports (via participants on Facebook) that their increase from 10 million to 20 million cells hasn't resulted in any additional improvements.

A new discovery at the University of Alberta will fundamentally alter how spinal cord function and rehabilitation are viewed after spinal cord injuries.
Neuroscientists found that spinal blood flow was unexpectedly restricted after a spinal cord injury, and that improving blood flow or simply inhaling more oxygen produces lasting improvements in cord oxygenation and motor functions.
Previous work had shown that while blood flow was temporarily disrupted at the injury site, it resumed rapidly. It was more or less assumed that the blood flow was normal below the injury. This turns out to be wrong.
“We’ve shown for the first time that a spinal cord injury leads to a chronic state of poor blood flow and lack of oxygen to neuronal networks in the spinal cord,” said co-principal investigator Karim Fouad, professor in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine and Canada Research Chair for spinal cord injury.
“By elevating oxygen in the spinal cord we can improve function and re-establish activity in different parts of the body.”
more...

Robotics are helping paralyzed people walk again, but the price tag is huge

Ashley Barnes was 35 years old when doctors told her she would never walk again.
A botched spinal procedure in 2014 paralyzed her from the waist down. The Tyler, Tex., resident had been an avid runner, clocking six miles daily when not home with her then-9-year-old autistic son, whom she raised alone. Life in a wheelchair was not an option.
“I needed to be the best mom I could be,” Barnes said. “I needed to be up and moving.”
So she threw herself into physical therapy, convinced she would one day run again. Soon she realized that wasn’t a reality.
Although she wore a brave face, “I would save my moments of crying for my room,” she said.
more....http://www.denverpost.com/2017/06/10...zed-expensive/

The spinal cord makes up a key part of the body’s motor and nervous systems. It is what relays communications between neurons in our muscles and neurons in the brain, ultimately controlling muscle movements. It also delivers sensory information regarding pain, temperature, and touch between the brain and other body parts.

This is why spinal cord injuries are so inhibiting. Where motor neurons connect with the spinal cord, they form what is known as the motor root (this is called the sensory root for sensory neurons), which is essentially a clump or knot of neurons surrounding the site of attachment. When traumatic injuries occur to the spine, these roots are often torn, causing the patient to lose neuron function in those areas. Scientists have spent years researching treatments for these injuries that may help patients recover some of the functions provided by the spinal cord.

​More than one-and-a-half years after implantation, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and the San Diego Veterans Administration Medical Center report that human neural stem cells (NSCs) grafted into spinal cord injuries in laboratory rats displayed continued growth and maturity, with functional recovery beginning one year after grafting.
The findings are published in the September issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation .
“The NSCs retained an intrinsic human rate of maturation despite being placed in a traumatic rodent environment,” said Paul Lu, PhD, associate professor of neurosciences and lead author of the study. “That’s a finding of great importance in planning for human clinical trials.”
Neural stem cells differentiate into neurons and glia or support cells. Researchers like Lu and colleague, Mark Tuszynski, MD, PhD, professor of neuroscience and director of the UC San Diego Translational Neuroscience Institute, have explored their potential as a sort of patch and remedy for spinal cord injuries, implanting NSCs derived from induced pluripotent stem cells into animal models of spinal cord injuries to repair damage. In previously published animal studies, Lu and Tuszynski have shown NSCs can survive implantation and make new connections, even beginning to restore limited physical function, such as foot movement, that had been lost to paralyzing injury.